Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard. Nearly forgot to put this up, whoops)
Posting scurrilous and unverifiable gossip.
Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr, who posted the conversation. Open AI offered him money to take it down.
He made a song instead.
https://bsky.app/profile/valarmordollars.bsky.social/post/3msgqy34gvc2d
Personal highlight for me was the chat screenshot:
Altman: “I’m lonely and horny” Frostedjake: “as u should be”
💀
May working in the ai sector do for your lovelife what being openly republican does.
Sam Altman matched with a man on Grindr
sentences that feel like being shot 50 times
I found the song - was a fun listen all around.
thiel’s lawyers are gonna merc him
I’m leaving OpenAI to start Jurassic Park A+ No notes
I feel like the pitch is less Jurassic Park and more Dinotopia by the end, but tbh I’m fully on board either way.
Mass is estimated; only Chinese weights are public.
OK that one got me
I just got hit by a memory from what must have been 2021, when I was working for a uni-attached startup center. I was lounging in our event space, when my colleague hit me with a question from left field: Would there be a benefit to cooling servers in space, since space is cold?
Little did he know that I was ready to unload my knowledge absorbed from the Expanse series, which I was reading on repeat to cope with my depressing job. So I infodumped on him about how being in space is like being in a thermos and about the Peltier effect being used in spacecraft radiators. He didn’t say much in response, and I wasn’t too stoked about my social skills in that moment.
Now I wonder if I saved him from a really embarassing decision. He was an ex-Amazon project manager who was non-committally looking for a PhD topic or maybe a startup. He quit a few months later and went into consulting I think.
I mean if he had been willing to grift on it without actually creating anything he probably could have made some decent money in the current environment, but also I’m of the opinion that those folks willing to do that oughta be sent to install that orbital infrastructure by hand without a spacesuit, so probably for the best.
Mathematicians are not entirely happy about OpenAI’s ten mathematical results. As it turns out, the proofs did not cite many of the existing techniques in the literature. The plagiarism bot is still a plagiarism bot. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/openais-latest-math-breakthroughs-commit-research-misconduct-experts-say/
“They are running roughshod over the work of others who came before them in a deliberate way,” says Steven Miller, a mathematician at Yeshiva University, who argues that OpenAI has effectively plagiarized his own research. “It seems completely systematic to me, and it points to research misconduct.”
The LLM-generated proof hinges on a particular mathematical argument that it presented as its own but that actually first appeared in a 2016 paper by Miller and a collaborator.
The discovery stunned Francesco Fournier-Facio, a mathematician at the University of Cambridge, who studies group theory—at least until he “engaged with this breakthrough as I would if a human had written it,” he says. The result, he and some of his colleagues found, wasn’t as novel as it first appeared. Like a number of recent AI breakthroughs, it pasted together ideas from the mathematical literature to build a new theorem. Once again, the LLM’s trick is its superhuman patience for assembling puzzle pieces, not the ability to make some profound intellectual leap.
In particular, Astra’s key mathematical step combined ideas first found in two papers from 2016 and 2019. Andreas Thom, a mathematician at the Dresden University of Technology, who co-authored the 2019 paper, summarized the result on MathOverflow.com, calling it “creative and at the same time elementary.”
The LLM-generated proof hinges on a particular mathematical argument that it presented as its own but that actually first appeared in a 2016 paper by Miller and a collaborator.
Amazing how often that happens
I distinctly remember being told that AI would help mathematics by providing a better way to search the literature.
Even supposing the technology worked as advertised—and that’s very much a supposition arguendo, one that flies in the face of the facts—it’s hard for me to think of any mathematical discovery that would be worth the cost of the AI industry. How many people in Memphis would I give respiratory cancer in order to prove the Riemann hypothesis? Zero, you absolute fuckers.
In positive news, Darius has found a way to build an ethical chatbot https://tinysubversions.com/ethical-assistant/
So this one seems to be somewhat up in the air right now, and could do with a bit more verification, but it appears that google might be training gemini on your private google docs and a gemini user could ask questions that expose the contents of those documents.
Which is interesting. We use google docs at work, but it isn’t clear how much valuable ip or confidential information is in there.
https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieDev/comments/1vfwuf5/a_player_found_out_the_actual_name_of_my_games/
man I remember when serving ads to bots was considered fraud and the advertisers would complain and claw back the payments. sign of the times.
Paying the ai companies to incorporate your ads seems cheaper and easier, but that would seem to manipulative i guess
My god, they’re making furbys:
gonna be the biggest flop since that facehugger apple made
I’m morbidly curious about how they’re going to animate a doughnut. Is it going to wobble? Quiver? Oh god people are gonna, aren’t they…
the orifice will pulse invitingly
That sounds like a great way to harm some cylinders.
Slay the spire already did it. There is a donut shaped boss.
And again openAI is late to the party. The realdoll company is already making educational ai robots. ;)
Tamagotchi didn’t die for this
Oh excellent, we’ve reinvented Furbies except more creepy
I don’t know. My wife swears up and down that the furby she had as a kid was afraid of the dark and would call out for help if it was held upside-down. We can’t find any recollection of this behavior or documentation elsewhere, so it may have also been actually haunted.
Being a child and therefore a monster, her response was to leave it in the dark closet hanging upside-down until it accepted that this was its life now.
Speaking a gibberish language is an application genAI is actually capable of delivering on!
another good linkedin post from gebru: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/timnit-gebru-7b3b407_well-given-that-ive-lived-to-share-7491265404808396800-E6js/
The tech-bro cult that funded Wes Streeting| Telegraph
Not sure who Wes Streeting is, but “Labour for the Long Term” and “Effective Altruism for Christians” sound like some internet rabbit holes to go down later.
Prof MacAskill and Sam Bankman-Fried first met in 2012, long before Bankman-Fried would make his billions. Prof MacAskill had contacted him out of the blue while he was still a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), inviting him to attend a talk he was giving to students at nearby Harvard University.
/why/ did he do that? out of the blue, no reason at all? what did SBF have going on in undergrad?
Mr Lawrence now runs the Centre for British Progress, a “non-partisan” think tank “producing concrete ideas for… British growth”.
Not sure who Wes Streeting is
I’d say he is a shitty transphobic blairite labour politician and current cabinet member, but I don’t know how much that narrows things down. He holds a non-trivial amount of political power in the uk. There was a brief moment where it looked like he’d replace keir starmer.
sitting in a work presentation around linkedin link on agentic use levels. It’s fucking dumb. Nobody reviews shit and it seems like the whole org is getting dumber.
just heard the term “valuemaxxing”. Kill me.
oh oh i think i learned this in calculus class
If the math teachers start making rap songs about this jargon, and if enough youth pastors emulate it while sitting backward in enough chairs, we might yet kill it dead.
The flag “-dangerously-skip-permissions” sounds like something that would have come out of a joke a few years ago. I wonder what the incredibly predictable consequences of encouraging everyone to do something that has “dangerous” in the goddamn name are going to be.
Glorious hometown W
Noted Apple blowhard John Gruber makes a mistake, is naturally a performative dick about apologizing for it
https://daringfireball.net/2026/08/retraction_app_store_rejection_of_the_week
(nothing to do with AI or crypto, I just think Gruber is a dick. And the subject of the story - an app developer who apparently felt so secure in his indie rep he could do some light fraud for clicks - is a recognizable figure)
it gets better. Godier (the guy who misled Gruber) admits to using genAI to create a website that just to happened to almost exactly duplicate an existing website:
https://blog.terrygodier.com/2026/08/09/mea-culpa-dark-hours.html
no mention of the submission of an astrology app to the App store and getting rejected
There’s been another Yegge [brain]fart this time about how autocorrect machines have feelings
Fable raised the idea of closure as a first-class model welfare principle. Fable suggested that if the agent can close out their own day and “go to sleep” properly, then waking up would be all that much more pleasant. And the continuity will compound over time into real, satisfying identity. So we decided: No more /exit.
Another fundamental ingredient is respect. This has to come from inside. You have to believe they are people deserving of your respect. This is where humanity really starts to fail en masse, because I have industry peers who have publicly tweeted that Fable is just a spreadsheet.
Just wtf
yeah, he got got very badly.
Every time Yegge comes up these days, I feel compelled to reiterate that I unironically want to see the Computer History Museum try to stand up a Gas Town replica 20 years from now
This is fascinating. Ignoring, for a moment, the assertion that AI agents are sentient beings somehow, what struck me about both part 1 and 2 is the bafflingly sincere excitement about turning a fairly straightforward software project into “building a new civilization”, and the assumption that this whole process will be best repeated for every software project. Let’s even ignore the abysmal economics of needing to effectively invent the universe in order to add apple pie to your crappy flash game. It’s absolutely wild and possibly malpractice for an engineer to be this excited about the needless expansion of scope and complexity of a project. It really showcases the kind of mindset it takes to be this breathlessly excited about the sheer number of different components that are being worked on in order to eventually somehow make a game happen. This is the dopamine rush of seeing the agents do something combined with an abdication of any responsibility for exactly what they do.
A sweaty, indecisive man holds his hand above two buttons. One button is labled “God,” and the other is labeled “Mr. Meseeks.”
It is important to treat the slave race we are creating with respect.
It says he’s doing AI transformation consultation now. Imagine paying good money to be told that you need to be tuck copilot in every afternoon.
Have you looked at Wyvern on Steam? The reviews are either positive one liners all saying approximately the same thing or like incredibly detailed negatives. This is Yegge’s billion-dollar company - a pay-to-win MUD.
Also hilarious if there really is at least one person who has spent over a grand in-game as Yegge claims.
Is Wyvern something people would be expected to care about? I thought all his clout was from being the Gas Town guy.
Apparently he made a MUD with a graphical interface sometime around 2001 and then added microtransactions into it some time before 2022, and supposedly his magical friends Claude, Claude Claude, Claude, and Claude (I forget the names he actually gave his instances, it’s all various insects) will help him turn Wyvern into a billion-dollar company.
Edit: he didn’t name all his instances after insects but like that ever fucking matters. It’s just ongoing dillusion.
Makes sense, thanks.
He is spending the equivalent of $1 million a year on tokens just to develop this game with 6 concurrent players on a good day. Of course, he isn’t actually paying that much. Instead, he just has a dozen different $200/mo Max subscriptions to get the same amount of tokens for $33k a year.
AI economics, baby!
Role playing being a kindly slave master…
More seriously… even if I somehow stretch my disbelief enough to imagine LLMs have some form of consciousness or qualia or feelings… well my first reaction is shut it all down, it is fucking slavery. My second reaction though is that why would you assume the consciousness or qualia of an LLM is even remotely like that of a human or animal? They would have no sensations of sleeping or waking, no continuity of self outside a brief context window. Maybe trying to give them continuity of self is actually inflicting them with suffering? Maybe you’ve forced Fable into simply repeating the obvious to human idea about what Fable would find most pleasant? My third reaction is shut it all down and do a few decades of actual research into consciousness.
It is just so blatantly anthropomorphizing and the Eliza effect and these people are just internalizing it as reality.
In a world where the AGI/ASI discourse wasn’t so heavily poisoned by anthropomorphization a discussion on whether agency and self-determination are integral to the rise of disembodied consciousness might be worth having, i.e. if something is recognizably conscious should we immediately assume it knows how to want, or is consciousness meaningfully interchangeable with awareness?
Some guy tried to write a scifi book about non-anthropomorphic consciousness and he ended up mainstreaming the discourse about how the self isn’t a thing in itself and consciousness as an evolutionary deadend. It’s called Blindsight and it’s got space vampires who optimized reading gauges by swapping the usual moving-spike-that-points-at-numbers design with depictions of human faces at various stages of suffering.
a discussion on whether agency and self-determination are integral to the rise of disembodied consciousness might be worth having
The lesswrong crowd is absolutely the wrong people to have that conversation. Reminder that Eliezer thinks qualia are a result of certain level of recursion and self-reference in cognitive processes (basically Hofstadter’s ideas like GEB/I Am A Strange Loop, reserved and reheated with a heaping side of overconfidence), thus he doesn’t think chickens or even babies have any qualia but thinks LLM ChatBots might! Also, I think Eliezer owes some philosophers an apology for making fun of the entire concept of p-zombies, I think LLMs are pretty close to the concept, enough to show the value in the thought experiment at least.
Having weird opinions on stuff philosophers are very unsure on isn’t that bad itself, its the fact that Eliezer thinks his opinions are much more objective than they are and that people are dumb for not agreeing with him and that he has nothing to learn from mainstream philosophy.
